your daily dose of photography

Introduction

Christmas is getting closer and closer, only 20 days to go and everyone is getting busy decorating houses and Christmas trees. I am going to try to cover in this article how the technique needed to take good Christmas lights pictures outside.

Here is a tutorial showing how a professional photographer sets up the lights to make a studio portrait.
All pictures in and text in this tutorial are copyrighted to Ben from SonShine Studio.

This photography lighting tutorial is constituted of seven images.
Five will show what each light does on its own, one will show all of the lights together, then the final image will show a wide angle shot showing the light placement around the subject.

This post is dedicated to the new photographers, it is a quickly compiled set of tips to help you improve your photography skills by pin-pointing some of the common errors that can easily spoil an image and giving tips to add impact to your pictures

The camera’s built in light meter will give us accurate reading most of the time unless we are exposed to “extreme” light conditions like snow or other highly reflective material like metal in the frame.
These elements can easily fool the camera’s light meter and it is much better to use a gray or white card or even an external light meter to get a more accurate reading.

So here is a tip of what to do if you happen not to have any of those and will get you a reliable white/gray card that you will leave at home.

The rule of thirds is probably the oldest trick in the bag, I don’t think there is any photography related website on the internet that doesn’t talk about it.
However old it remains one of the most important rules to learn and the easiest way to drastically improve your pictures.